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Podophyllotoxin is a plant-derived compound found in Podophyllum sp. that is used to produce semi-synthetic anticancer pharmaceuticals such as etoposide, teniposide, and etoposide phosphate. This chapter describes the role of biotechnology to produce podophyllotoxin and our ...

Plans by the space program to use plants for food supply and environmental regeneration have led to an examination of how plants grow in microgravity. Because secondary metabolic compounds are so important in determining the nutritional and flavor characteristics of plants—as well as ma ...

Plant cell culture technology is potentially useful in producing high-valued secondary metabolites. Eurycoma longifolia root extracts are consumed as a health tonic but more popularly used as an aphrodisiac. Studies on the aphrodisiac properties and the possible compounds invo ...

It is increasingly well accepted that addiction can be viewed as a form of neuronal plasticity, even as a type of very powerful, albeit maladaptive, learning. On a behavioral level, this can be conceptualized as the transition from experimentation to compulsive drug-seeking behavior. This v ...

High-mobility group box-1 (HMGB1) protein was originally described as a nuclear DNA-binding protein that functions as a structural cofactor critical for proper transcriptional regulation and gene expression. Recent studies indicate that damaged, necrotic cells liberate HMG ...

Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing disease with psychological and social factors (1). Compulsive drug-taking is a central feature of drug addiction (2–4). A major goal of drug abuse research is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the development of the loss of co ...

Traditionally, qualitative and quantitative detection of cell proliferation in the central nervous system (CNS) has been performed using tritiated thymidine autoradiography. In more recent years immunohistochemical detection of the thymidine analog 5-bromo-2′-deoxy ...

Addiction is a complex maladaptive behavior produced by repeated exposure to rewarding stimuli (1). There are two primary features of addiction to all forms of natural and pharmacological stimuli. First, the rewarding stimulus associated with the addiction is a compelling motivator of ...

Transgenic animals have become a key tool in functional genomics to generate models for human diseases and validate new drugs. Transgenesis includes the addition of foreign genetic information to animals and specific inhibition of endogenous gene expression. Recently, animal mod ...

Summary The intermediate filament (IF) cytoskeleton of mammalian epithelia is generated from pairs of type I and type II keratins that are encoded by two large gene families, made up of 54 genes in humans and the mouse. These genes are expressed in a spatiotemporal and tissue-specific manner from the ...

The future ability to manipulate the growth of new blood vessels (angiogenesis) holds great promise for treating ischemic disease and cancer. Several models of human in vivo angiogenesis have been described, but they seem to depend on transgenic support and have not been validated in a therap ...

Recent epidemiological research indicates that a coexistent anemia among patients with heart failure might worsen their prognosis. However, whether the reduced synthesis of red blood cells is a contributing factor to the development and progression to overt heart failure, or wheth ...

The ability of the immune system to distinguish between self- and nonself antigens is controlled by mechanisms of central and peripheral tolerance. Although the induction and maintenance of tolerance is important for preventing autoimmunity, breaking self-tolerance is a crucial c ...

Immunotherapy in cancer relies on the identification and characterization of potential target antigens that can be recognized by effector cells of the immune system. Several strategies have been developed to identify such antigens, which then can be used for immunization strategie ...

Functional proteomics is a promising technique for the rational identification of novel therapeutic targets and biological markers. The studies of protein-protein interactions have been gained from the development of high-throughput technologies such as the yeast two-hybr ...

The recent progress of proteomics has opened new avenues for tumor-associated antigen discovery. Here, I describe a two-dimensional (2D), gel-based Western blot approach for screening and identification of proteins eliciting a humoral response in cancer. Sera from patients are used in ...

The identification and validation of disease-causing target genes is an essential first step in drug discovery and development. Genomics and proteomics technologies have already begun to uncover novel functional pathways and therapeutic targets in several human diseases such as ...

Understanding responses of the cellular system for a dosing molecule is one of the most important problems in pharmacogenomics. In this chapter, we describe computational methods for identifying and validating drug target genes based on the gene networks estimated from microarray ge ...

The Cancer Gene Anatomy Project (CGAP) database of the National Cancer Institute has thousands of known and novel expressed sequence tags (ESTs). These ESTs, derived from diverse normal and tumor cDNA libraries, offer an attractive starting point for cancer gene discovery. Data-mining t ...

Pancreatic cancer is a lethal disease and rational strategies fo gene expression, and mass spectrometric analysis of proteins, have led to identification of cellular targets with considerable potential for clinical application and patient care. These studies underscore the imp ...